This paper presents a novel approach to human image colorization by fine-tuning the InstructPix2Pix model, which integrates a language model (GPT-3) with a text-to-image model (Stable Diffusion). Despite the original InstructPix2Pix model's proficiency in editing images based on textual instructions, it exhibits limitations in the focused domain of colorization. To address this, we fine-tuned the model using the IMDB-WIKI dataset, pairing black-and-white images with a diverse set of colorization prompts generated by ChatGPT. This paper contributes by (1) applying fine-tuning techniques to stable diffusion models specifically for colorization tasks, and (2) employing generative models to create varied conditioning prompts. After finetuning, our model outperforms the original InstructPix2Pix model on multiple metrics quantitatively, and we produce more realistically colored images qualitatively. The code for this project is provided on the GitHub Repository https://github.com/AllenAnZifeng/DeepLearning282.

Synthesizers are powerful tools that allow musicians to create dynamic and original sounds. Existing commercial interfaces for synthesizers typically require musicians to interact with complex low-level parameters or to manage large libraries of premade sounds. To address these challenges, we implement SynthScribe -- a fullstack system that uses multimodal deep learning to let users express their intentions at a much higher level. We implement features which address a number of difficulties, namely 1) searching through existing sounds, 2) creating completely new sounds, 3) making meaningful modifications to a given sound. This is achieved with three main features: a multimodal search engine for a large library of synthesizer sounds; a user centered genetic algorithm by which completely new sounds can be created and selected given the users preferences; a sound editing support feature which highlights and gives examples for key control parameters with respect to a text or audio based query. The results of our user studies show SynthScribe is capable of reliably retrieving and modifying sounds while also affording the ability to create completely new sounds that expand a musicians creative horizon.

Despite the commercial abundance of UAVs, aerial data acquisition remains challenging, and the existing Asia and North America-centric open-source UAV datasets are small-scale or low-resolution and lack diversity in scene contextuality. Additionally, the color content of the scenes, solar-zenith angle, and population density of different geographies influence the data diversity. These two factors conjointly render suboptimal aerial-visual perception of the deep neural network (DNN) models trained primarily on the ground-view data, including the open-world foundational models. To pave the way for a transformative era of aerial detection, we present Multiview Aerial Visual RECognition or MAVREC, a video dataset where we record synchronized scenes from different perspectives -- ground camera and drone-mounted camera. MAVREC consists of around 2.5 hours of industry-standard 2.7K resolution video sequences, more than 0.5 million frames, and 1.1 million annotated bounding boxes. This makes MAVREC the largest ground and aerial-view dataset, and the fourth largest among all drone-based datasets across all modalities and tasks. Through our extensive benchmarking on MAVREC, we recognize that augmenting object detectors with ground-view images from the corresponding geographical location is a superior pre-training strategy for aerial detection. Building on this strategy, we benchmark MAVREC with a curriculum-based semi-supervised object detection approach that leverages labeled (ground and aerial) and unlabeled (only aerial) images to enhance the aerial detection. We publicly release the MAVREC dataset: https://mavrec.github.io.

This study targets a critical aspect of multi-modal LLMs' (LLMs&VLMs) inference: explicit controllable text generation. Multi-modal LLMs empower multi-modality understanding with the capability of semantic generation yet bring less explainability and heavier reliance on prompt contents due to their autoregressive generative nature. While manipulating prompt formats could improve outputs, designing specific and precise prompts per task can be challenging and ineffective. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel inference method, Prompt Highlighter, which enables users to highlight specific prompt spans to interactively control the focus during generation. Motivated by the classifier-free diffusion guidance, we form regular and unconditional context pairs based on highlighted tokens, demonstrating that the autoregressive generation in models can be guided in a classifier-free way. Notably, we find that, during inference, guiding the models with highlighted tokens through the attention weights leads to more desired outputs. Our approach is compatible with current LLMs and VLMs, achieving impressive customized generation results without training. Experiments confirm its effectiveness in focusing on input contexts and generating reliable content. Without tuning on LLaVA-v1.5, our method secured 69.5 in the MMBench test and 1552.5 in MME-perception. The code is available at: https://github.com/dvlab-research/Prompt-Highlighter/

In this paper, we propose a latent-variable generative model called mixture of dynamical variational autoencoders (MixDV AE) to model the dynamics of a system composed of multiple moving sources. A DV AE model is pre-trained on a single-source dataset to capture the source dynamics. Then, multiple instances of the pre-trained DV AE model are integrated into a multi-source mixture model with a discrete observation-to-source assignment latent variable. The posterior distributions of both the discrete observation-to-source assignment variable and the continuous DV AE variables representing the sources content/position are estimated using a variational expectation-maximization algorithm, leading to multi-source trajectories estimation. We illustrate the versatility of the proposed MixDV AE model on two tasks: a computer vision task, namely multi-object tracking, and an audio processing task, namely single-channel audio source separation. Experimental results show that the proposed method works well on these two tasks, and outperforms several baseline methods.

Given a set of candidate entities (e.g. movie titles), the ability to identify similar entities is a core capability of many recommender systems. Most often this is achieved by collaborative filtering approaches, i.e. if users co-engage with a pair of entities frequently enough, the embeddings should be similar. However, relying on co-engagement data alone can result in lower-quality embeddings for new and unpopular entities. We study this problem in the context recommender systems at Netflix. We observe that there is abundant semantic information such as genre, content maturity level, themes, etc. that complements co-engagement signals and provides interpretability in similarity models. To learn entity similarities from both data sources holistically, we propose a novel graph-based approach called SemanticGNN. SemanticGNN models entities, semantic concepts, collaborative edges, and semantic edges within a large-scale knowledge graph and conducts representation learning over it. Our key technical contributions are twofold: (1) we develop a novel relation-aware attention graph neural network (GNN) to handle the imbalanced distribution of relation types in our graph; (2) to handle web-scale graph data that has millions of nodes and billions of edges, we develop a novel distributed graph training paradigm. The proposed model is successfully deployed within Netflix and empirical experiments indicate it yields up to 35% improvement in performance on similarity judgment tasks.

With the constant spread of misinformation on social media networks, a need has arisen to continuously assess the veracity of digital content. This need has inspired numerous research efforts on the development of misinformation detection (MD) models. However, many models do not use all information available to them and existing research contains a lack of relevant datasets to train the models, specifically within the South African social media environment. The aim of this paper is to investigate the transferability of knowledge of a MD model between different contextual environments. This research contributes a multimodal MD model capable of functioning in the South African social media environment, as well as introduces a South African misinformation dataset. The model makes use of multiple sources of information for misinformation detection, namely: textual and visual elements. It uses bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) as the textual encoder and a residual network (ResNet) as the visual encoder. The model is trained and evaluated on the Fakeddit dataset and a South African misinformation dataset. Results show that using South African samples in the training of the model increases model performance, in a South African contextual environment, and that a multimodal model retains significantly more knowledge than both the textual and visual unimodal models. Our study suggests that the performance of a misinformation detection model is influenced by the cultural nuances of its operating environment and multimodal models assist in the transferability of knowledge between different contextual environments. Therefore, local data should be incorporated into the training process of a misinformation detection model in order to optimize model performance.

In an era where information is ubiquitous, the news media's role expands beyond mere reporting; it actively constructs and frames public discourse[Raza and Ding, 2022]. The power of the media to influence perception and decision-making cannot be understated, especially in a world where news is consumed in real-time from a number of sources[Raza, 2021]. Traditional notions of media as impartial observers are giving way to a more critical understanding of its participatory role in shaping socio-political narratives. The dataset introduced in this research represents a crucial step in addressing the multifaceted nature of news media bias. This data includes a wide array of dimensions such as race, gender, age, occupation, and climate change. The dataset provides a holistic tool for showing the complex interplay of factors that characterize contemporary news media. This approach acknowledges that biases in media are not monolithic but are instead a confluence of various underlying factors, each contributing to the overarching narrative in its unique way [Lei et al., 2022]. This expansive scope is particularly important given the current global landscape, where issues of racial and gender equality, climate change, and political polarization are at the forefront of public consciousness.

Diffusion models and large language models have emerged as leading-edge generative models, revolutionizing various aspects of human life. However, the practical implementations of these models have also exposed inherent risks, bringing to the forefront their evil sides and sparking concerns regarding their trustworthiness. Despite the wealth of literature on this subject, a comprehensive survey specifically delving into the intersection of large-scale generative models and their trustworthiness remains largely absent. To bridge this gap, this paper investigates both the long-standing and emerging threats associated with these models across four fundamental dimensions: 1) privacy, 2) security, 3) fairness, and 4) responsibility. Based on the investigation results, we develop an extensive map outlining the trustworthiness of large generative models. After that, we provide practical recommendations and potential research directions for future secure applications equipped with large generative models, ultimately promoting the trustworthiness of the models and benefiting the society as a whole.

To serve the intricate and varied demands of image editing, precise and flexible manipulation in image content is indispensable. Recently, Drag-based editing methods have gained impressive performance. However, these methods predominantly center on point dragging, resulting in two noteworthy drawbacks, namely "miss tracking", where difficulties arise in accurately tracking the predetermined handle points, and "ambiguous tracking", where tracked points are potentially positioned in wrong regions that closely resemble the handle points. To address the above issues, we propose FreeDrag, a feature dragging methodology designed to free the burden on point tracking. The FreeDrag incorporates two key designs, i.e., template feature via adaptive updating and line search with backtracking, the former improves the stability against drastic content change by elaborately controls feature updating scale after each dragging, while the latter alleviates the misguidance from similar points by actively restricting the search area in a line. These two technologies together contribute to a more stable semantic dragging with higher efficiency. Comprehensive experimental results substantiate that our approach significantly outperforms pre-existing methodologies, offering reliable point-based editing even in various complex scenarios.